


Blueshift

by TheSightlessSniper



Series: Rebirth [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anzu Being Awesome, Anzu-Positive, Anzu-centric, Friendship, It may be best just to go along with it because half of it appeared to me in a dream, M/M, One incidence of a racial slur, The lengths that this girl will go to for her best friends is astounding, There's a lot of weird visual stuff in this, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 05:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17037359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSightlessSniper/pseuds/TheSightlessSniper
Summary: "Time comes for everyone.In Anzu’s opinion, time came for Atemu far too soon. Twice."After Anzu sees the state her best friend has fallen into after the Pharaoh left for his afterlife, she seeks to do something about that.





	Blueshift

**Author's Note:**

> How did I fall back into writing for this fandom? Who knows.
> 
> Here is an unofficial follow-up to my previous Yu-Gi-Oh! fic! I'll be grouping them together later for ease of finding them.

Time comes for everyone.

In Anzu’s opinion, time came for Atemu far too soon. Twice.

Graduation happens. She moves to the US, and it’s great for a while. It’s not long before politics catch up with her, though; she’s a foreigner—someone actually uses the words “Ching-Chong” to describe her as she walks out of a convenience store—and there are a lot of people who want her out of their school even though her scholarship (and perfect English) entitles her to be there as much as someone born there. Even so, she fights back against it, and in just a month she’s already one of the top dancers in her class. 

It’s one evening after her classes that she’s slumped back on her couch in her apartment, drink cracked open and her roommate whining about his brother hogging the bathroom, when she gets a video-call from a familiar face.

The white hair is unmistakeable. ‘Hey Ryou! How’s it going?’

The young man’s head tilts, and he shrugs. ‘I’m fine. Yuugi? He’s not good.’

She listens to him talk through it all; how Yuugi had thrown himself into nothing but work and school, and how he was barely speaking to anyone. There’s a brief mention of his grandpa, but the old man is in surprising good health and spry for his many years, but even he seems down with his grandson having no time to spend at the game shop with him.

When Ryou’s done, Anzu’s first thought is whether she’s got enough in her bank account to take a trip to see her old friend. ‘Is there anything Kaiba can do? What about Ishizu?’

‘They can’t bring back the dead, as much as they want to. Seto isn’t just hellbent on facing Atemu anymore, especially since Yuugi works for him now. Even he’s worried about him.’

She and Ryou talk a little longer, sharing their worry and debating how to pull Yuugi out of the cycle he’s fallen into. As the call ends, and Ryou waves her goodbye, she’s already booked the first flight she can get back to Japan.

 

The flight home is mostly uneventful. She watches a few movies on her iPad, reprimands a kid who keeps kicking the back of her chair, and makes a point of being extra-polite to one of the attendants after someone four rows forward is particularly awkward and rude to her.

She gets back home in no time, immediately dumping her stuff and heading out. She knows she smells like she’s been on a long flight, and her hair is mussed up and oily from the weird air conditions, but her friends have seen worse.

Yuugi’s not home when she gets to the game shop. His grandpa opens the door, welcoming her in and enveloping her in a bear-hug. ‘Ah, I’ve missed you, little apricot.’

She rolls her eyes at the endearment, but squeezes back all the same. ‘I missed your hugs, gramps.’

Talk quickly turns to Yuugi, and it’s only as the man starts describing his grandson that she realises just how tired he looks, how somehow in the space of a few short months he’s aged ten years through worrying.

Halfway through grandpa asking about her dancing, Yuugi appears through the front door.

The change is almost disturbing. Once bright-eyed even in the face of the most mortal danger, everything about him seems almost lifeless; his hair is pulled back into a tight ponytail, the dye that was usually permanently bright long been neglected and left to grow out. His eyes have lost their youthful shine, and dark circles mar the skin around his eyes like a raccoon. For someone so young, he looks like he’s almost at the grave.

He perks up slightly at the sight of her, hugging her hello, but it doesn’t seem to do much. The second they part, he’s out of the room again, heading up to his bedroom.

She won’t have enough for another flight to Japan for a while. Time to give some tough love.

Excusing herself, she waltzes up the stairs to Yuugi’s bedroom. She’s been there enough times, watching movies on his bed and talking late into the night about crushes and food and whatever things came into their head during a slumber party. But it’s almost unrecognisable now. Almost all of the posters are gone off the walls. The once pastel coloured walls are now stark white, cold and clinical, the sheets on the bed and the curtains the same. The one splash of colour in the room is a photo album on his desk, open on a page that she remembers vividly.

It was the one image she’d been able to get of the both of them, taken with a self-timer and the rest of the group at their sides. Atemu is grinning, and Yuugi is laughing, and they’ve each got an arm wrapped around each other pulling the peace sign with their free hand. Only after she had printed it, tucking one into Atemu’s hand just before the Ceremonial Duel to take with him, that she had noticed that their eyes weren’t on the lens of the camera. As she had looked closer, it had been clear that they had been looking at each other out of the corner of their eye. Yuugi had never said what had happened the night before the duel that sent Atemu back, but she had known somehow that something had happened between them, and that their real goodbye to each other hadn’t been in front of the doors to Atemu’s afterlife but behind the closed doors of a Kaibacorp aircraft bedroom.

Yuugi’s lying on the bed as she walks in, leaning against the desk and shaking her head. ‘I was hoping for a little more of a greeting than that, Mutou. How long have we been friends?’

Silence.

‘Ryou tells me that you’re working yourself to the bone.’

Yuugi moves on the sheets, but still says nothing.

‘Atemu wouldn’t have wanted you to live like this—‘

‘Don’t bring him up.’ Finally some raw emotion. ‘Don’t. You have no idea what—‘

‘He wouldn’t want you killing yourself just because he’s not here anymore.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone like that. This wasn’t just someone who lived down the street from me, who I saw every day and hung out with. He was in my head, and my body, and a part of me. He was—‘

‘Your soulmate.’

Yuugi finally looks up at her, and tears are already streaming down his face as she moves to sit down next to him. She sits with him as he cries until he can’t anymore, watching him fall asleep, before going back downstairs and bidding grandpa goodbye for the night. She had some research to do.

_There has to be a way to get him back_.

 

When Anzu wakes up the next morning, body having shifted half-out of her futon in the night, she feels sicker than she’s felt in months. _What a welcome back…catching the plague on the plane_.

Freshman Flu had made the rounds when she had first gotten to her dance school’s campus, leaving her bedridden for two days right in the middle of orientation time. Whatever she has now is on-par, stinging in her sinuses and her eyes physically hurting from the effort of opening her eyelids.

She knows it was a bad idea to stay up late. But she had been engrossed in research, spending until two-AM sifting through Ishizu’s carefully kept records and notes and quizzing her on ancient spells and artefacts that might help her cause. It hadn’t been until Marik had come in from a night out—dragging a bruised-lipped, mussed-hair Ryou by the arm behind him—that Ishizu had finally remembered something that had come in that day that she hadn’t had the chance to read yet. She had promised Anzu that the translations would be ready for reading that afternoon.

Forcing herself out of bed, she showers and brushes her teeth, dosing herself with decongestants and cough-drops before donning a mask to go out. Despite the weather being cold, her temperature fluctuates up before shooting back down erratically, and she’s sure that she looks insane as she travels towards the museum; her jacket gets pulled off and put back on so many times she’s concerned the denim will leave her with a friction burns.

She makes it to the museum for one-thirty, and prays that the effort was worth it.

 

When Ishizu puts the Puzzle down in front of her, her heart almost stops in her chest.

‘It arrived yesterday. Someone raided the collapsed tomb for the Items, and one of my associates back in Egypt brought them back to us to preserve and display. The key to bringing Atemu back is in the items.’

It’s more risky than Anzu first thought. She requires specific Duel Monster cards, some of which she knows she has and others that she’ll need to get from somewhere else; Kaiba or grandpa could probably source them for her. That part didn’t worry her.

It’s the next part that sets her on edge. ‘You will need go into the Puzzle. Once you reach the very tip of the pyramid, you will reach a chamber where you will be able to speak to Atemu directly, but only for a short while. If he doesn’t want to return, there will be nothing you can do to bring him back. This is the nature of the ritual…it is powerful, and one of the most ethical ones, but it comes with the double-edged result that if that person does not want to return, then you must give up and return without them.’

She looks to the pyramid, the vivid memory of what it had looked like around Yuugi’s neck flashing before her. He’d always looked happy, sometimes a little distant when he and Atemu would be talking to each other, but happy. When compared with the Yuugi she had met with the day before, there was no question about it.

It takes one call to Kaiba, and Mokuba is at Ishizu’s door within the hour, carrying all of the cards they would need. She’s a little relieved; if grandpa had found out what she needed them for and hopes had been raised, and she came back empty-handed, she would never forgive herself.

The spell is cast. Anzu lifts the Puzzle, running a finger down the eye at the centre, and hesitantly puts the chain around her neck.

Everything goes dark.

 

She expects it to look somewhat like a palace on the inside.

Instead, as she comes to in the middle of a solid gold floor, she’s perplexed by how much like an abandoned building it is; cobwebs litter every corner, dust caking rough wall surfaces and making her cough. Everything is dimly lit by torchlight that she can’t find the source of, and is a shadow of what she imagines to be its former self.

She blinks a few times, and a door materialises in the wall to her left. When she goes through it, it leads to another identical room, a door leading to the right this time. She follows the maze for what feels like hours, occasionally coming across different rooms in the process. There’s one that she knows has to have once been influenced by Yuugi, with games scattered across the floor and littering the single piece of furniture—a neatly made bed—like a messy child’s bedroom. Another seems like Domino High, a classroom completely absent of students, and nothing but the box that the Puzzle had once come in squarely planted in the middle of what had once been Yuugi’s desk. There’s an abandoned version of Domino City’s game arcade, the very top of the tower where Yuugi, Atem, and Kaiba had fought against Lumis and Umbra, and another holding nothing but a pedestal with a duel-disk set on top of it. They must have all been associated with very strong memories, and even with neither Atemu nor Yuugi inside the puzzle anymore, the golden puzzle has retained the remnants of their memories together like a time capsule.

The one that brings her to tears is the one before the last. It’s a perfect recreation of one of the bedrooms from Kaiba’s aircraft, and as she steps in the room, emotion hits her. It’s as if the room itself is infected with the sorrow they had felt that last night, emanating from every wall, the floor, the ceiling. She feels love, and pain, and distress, and the agony that Yuugi and Atemu had experienced knowing that it would be their only night together.

The last door is in the form of a wardrobe, and she has to duck to get through. She pushes through to the other side, and steps into the very last room. She gazes upwards towards the darkness above, and finds herself looking at the dizzying infinity of the universe. It takes her a moment to realise she’s no longer standing, but floating in the void of space around her. She’s had nightmares like this before, of falling endlessly to her death into the vacuum of space to never be seen again.

This feels different though. She slowly begins to sink downwards, her clothes and hair moving with her as if she were floating in water, but breath still comes easy. She falls, watching the void around her change until finally her feet touch down on something. She looks down, and finds herself stood on the edge of the atmosphere of a planet that looks a lot like Earth, the planet seemingly minuscule underneath her.

‘He’s not coping without me there, is he?’

Her head shoots up, whipping around in search of the voice. She pinpoints it after a few seconds, gazing across to another planet—Jupiter—to see the Pharaoh waving to her.

She leaps upwards, bounding across Mars easily until she gets to Jupiter and joins him. It’s a bigger planet, enough room to sit atop its surface next to him, and she settles down next to him on her knees. Anzu half-expected to see Atemu in his Pharaoh attire, made up with make-up and adorned with gold everywhere, looking regal and ready to rule his people. Instead, he’s in casual clothes, and looking down at his hands like he’s a lost child.

She shares some of the stories that Atemu has missed. She talks about Yuugi, and every time his name is mentioned, she can see the pain in the deep irises, the tears that well up and want to be let out. ‘He’s working himself into an early grave. We’re all worried about him.’

Atemu hasn’t faired any better. ‘I kept…searching for him in the palace even though I won’t find him. I’d hear words that sounded like his name, or a voice that sounded like his, and I’d look around for him before I’d remember. I know that there’s probably no chance I’ll ever be able to come back to my afterlife, but…’ He doesn’t have to finish the thought.

Standing, she offers her hand to him, and he takes it.

Her concerns that she would have to go back through all the rooms are immediately quelled; as soon as Atemu takes her hand, Anzu feels a tug behind her ribs, yanking her forward and hurtling into the infinity above, and then suddenly she’s awake and gasping on the floor of the museum, coughing and spluttering as she desperately tries to catch her breath.

When the room stops spinning, Marik is looking down at her with a smile on his face. ‘What do you think Yuugi’s going to do when Atemu walks through the doors to the game shop?’

She’s not sure what he says next. She’s already passed out again.

 

After calling ahead, grandpa already knows that Atemu has come back.

He doesn’t ask how. He just informs them that Yuugi is at work, but has promised that he’d be back in time to eat dinner. Grandpa makes a fuss over Atemu the second he makes it through the door, hugging him tight and scolding him for getting a little bit taller on him. He ensures that Atemu is fed, clean, and healthy before handing him back over to Anzu to deal with. And by deal with, she interprets this as bundle him into Yuugi’s bedroom so they can talk as soon as he gets back. ‘It’s probably best that you two talk alone. He’s going to have a lot of questions, and I don’t want anything interrupting you.’

‘What if…he changes his mind when he sees me?’

‘Don’t think that way. Just relax here, and I’ll message you when he gets home.’

Atemu’s barely been back an hour, and yet Kaiba already has him hooked up with all the documentation he would need, including a passport, and a top-of-the-line phone. Anzu has to laugh at that; for someone who seemed to be loathed to do anything for Atemu before, Kaiba was certainly keen to help him now. Clearly he’s hoping that soon he’d have the chance to really take back the King of Games title.

True to his word, Yuugi gets back just before dinner is ready. He still looks wiped out, but maybe he’s slept marginally better; the dark circles aren’t quite as prominent as they were yesterday. He seems to sense something is off halfway through dinner, because he puts his chopsticks down and stares at Anzu intently, silently begging for an answer.

The wait is over.

 

She’s outside the room when Yuugi walks into his bedroom, listening around the door.

‘Atemu? You—you can’t—you’re not—‘

‘Yuugi…’

‘Is—is it really you?’ Yuugi’s voice is quaking, threatening to crack.

She assumes Atemu nods instead of speaks. There’s a rustle of clothes, and then sobbing. Poking her head around the door, she smiles at the sight that greets her; Yuugi’s face buried in Atemu’s shoulder, his tearful face pressing against the side of Yuugi’s head, wrapped up tightly in one another’s arms lying on the bed.

Anzu takes it as her cue to leave.

 

A few days later, she’s back in the US, and everything slips back into its normal routine.

Yuugi’s apparently changed, though; after almost a year and a half of solid work and study, he informs Anzu that he’s finally taken some of his vacation days and has blown off a few inessential classes, with a few choice words and a deep blush insinuating that he and Atemu have barely left the bedroom for three days.

Atemu had already made himself popular; as well as Jou and Honda being ecstatic to see him again, Kaiba has insisted that as soon as he and Yuugi are finished ‘reacquainting themselves with each other’, he wants both of them on his new holographic projection stadium to face off against him and each other, and for Atemu to begin working for Kaibacorp in testing the new products. Anzu can tell it runs deeper than that, though; Kaiba had missed Atemu as a rival and a friend as much as the rest of them, even if he refused to admit it.

Agreeing that they need to come over and visit her soon, she ends the call and grins to herself, quickly rousing the suspicions of her roommate.

He nudges her elbow as he sits down next to her on the couch, handing her an orange juice from the fridge and wiggling his eyebrows. ‘You get up to anything interesting while you were back in Japan? All I need is pronouns, and all the dirty details.’

The memories of the last few days replay in her head. The Puzzle’s maze. The void. The delivery of a long-dead Pharaoh into the present day through ancient magic. There was no way that he’d understand anything like that without having been there.

She stifles a chuckle, drains the glass, and pats him on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, buddy. Nothing to tell this time.’

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the Good Tiger song of the same name (I highly recommend giving it a listen!). But I also found out that Blueshift (specifically Doppler Blueshift) is actually a scientific phenomenon to do with wavelengths 'caused by movement of a source towards the observer'. It may work well as a title if you think of Atemu as the source moving closer to the observer, although I am most definitely no scientist in any way shape or form, so I could be way off and Blueshift just sounds really good as a title.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


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